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An Afterward About Clouds

Reviewing my post on the Kindle Fire, I realized that neither Amazon nor Google care about people using their cloud services, per se. In fact, if you include Apple in this list, it becomes obvious that the big three might look like competitors, but each one wants something different from consumers.

Amazon sells hardware to get people to buy content from them.

Google sells neither hardware nor content; instead the company gives away free services to draw people to Google's websites to see advertisements.

Apple sells content to get people to buy their hardware.

Interestingly, Amazon and Google can cooperate in this mode of operation, and they actually do cooperate. Yes, there is some overlap in services (e.g. Google Checkout), but generally speaking, Amazon and Google play nicely. On the other hand, Apple remains a competitor to both.

How do clouds play into this arena? Amazon wants people to use their cloud services to strongly encourage consumers to continue getting content from Amazon. Google wants people to use their cloud services because it's another service platform that Google uses to sell advertising. But Google does not really care if you buy your music from Amazon before loading it into Google Music. And Amazon does not really care if you take music you bought at Amazon and load it into Google Music.